Plus there's no need for alts - you can level up all jobs on one character. I'm not sure if that will help or hurt alt-itis, but I like the idea.

I really like how they do the duty/dungeon roulette as well - it's world-wide, not just server-wide when trying to put a party together. So you join the queue, wait however long needed for the system to put a party together, then you start. I did Aurum Vale last night (so 4 person party) with two people from another server and one from Goblin, plus me from Faerie. It was a nice quick run for my first time there.

My only complaint though is that almost all the quests I have right no involve me going into specific dungeons and so I just pick which quest I feel like doing that night when I log in.

But hey, level 57 now, got semi-decent sets of gear on both my Summoner and Scholar, it's not horribly long wait times for the roulette with either class, and I"m getting closer to opening up Heavensward now, and I"m by no means a hardcore player, either. Just been getting on in evenings when I feel like it with more extended playing on the weekends occasionally.

Some of my friends are falling into the subscription mmo trap and choosing this game. Whats so special about this again beside it being a grindy asian mmo?

It's not a grindy Asian MMO like RuneScape or FFXI. Leveling a new character is incredibly fast. Not only does the MSQ drive you all the way to 70, new players get a buff that doubles EXP gained, every Free Company is running the EXP buff. There's a bunch of items that boost exp gain as well. There's also the Armory bonus, which gives you an additional 50% bonus so long as you have one job leveled higher than your current job. Gear is pretty much straight vertical progression in that each major content patch ups the ilvl and adds new raids. You just run the various roulette daily and you have one job geared out in a few weeks. There is grind if you want it, but it's not out of the gate.

There is a TON of obnoxiously patronizing busy quests along the main story arc that I found so intolerable I had to quit. I am tired of games treating you like an idiot. I'm just too old for that shit. Pity, because the actual story is decent, the art is amazing and many of the systems, from combat to crafting, are as well developed as I've seen them in MMOs.

I should get back to nature, too. You know, like going to a shop for groceries instead of the computer. Maybe a condo in the woods that doesn't even have a health club or restaurant attached. Buy a car with only two cup holders or something.

Guildmate (FC-mate, whatever) suggested I pick up another class/job because I'm just now getting into Heavensward stuff and I'm already level 59, which means I've almost outleveled the HW content. So I picked up Samurai (since you can get that at 50) and after figuring out how to change jobs finally (just change weapon), I started off with the first SAM quest. I feel like I was just dropped into the middle of things with no context because I essentially was, but the beginning trial gives you an overview of what the class is like. It's different enough from SMN/SCH that I was enjoying diving in and out of attacks a lot. The combat effects are cool. Now to figure out which attacks combo off each other and I'll be much better off.

I had been planning on getting to 60 and then picking up another job/class, but what he said made sense, especially if HW is supposed to be 50-60 level content. Still thinking of picking up Archer so I can get Bard down the line, but I'll play with SAM for a while instead.

There is a TON of obnoxiously patronizing busy quests along the main story arc that I found so intolerable I had to quit. I am tired of games treating you like an idiot. I'm just too old for that shit. Pity, because the actual story is decent, the art is amazing and many of the systems, from combat to crafting, are as well developed as I've seen them in MMOs.

This is a fairly common criticism leveled at the game, and it's fair. I believe there's 100 quests from the end of ARR until you unlock HW. The only response is that if you grind it out, the quests for HW and SB are a lot better. Funny enough, if you play the DRK jobs quests, this point is brought up repeatedly. The DRK jobs quests were written by the same woman who did the ARR quests and tend to be commentary on the experience players have.

SMN/SCH (Arcanist) and DRG (Lancer) are the only two I've played up from level 1, the other classes I picked up mid-stream - MCH and DRK started me at level 30 and RDM and SAM started at level 50. It's not too bad really, and now at least I'll be playing SB content at level. I have decent gear for my SMN, good gear for the SAM, okay gear for the SCH, hand-me-downs for the RDM and everything else has stuff I had in my inventory that I didn't get rid of. Managing your inventory is insane though. Not enough storage space at all, and considering you can change jobs on a whim, you don't really want to ever get rid of anything good either, so finding storage space and then remembering what you have already is a PITA.

It's already a console game though, so that wouldn't be too hard to move it to Switch, would it?

<< PC gamer.

Anyways, still enjoying myself and this lets me play casually while still getting groups for whatever dungeons and raids I want to do. Heck, doing Syrcus Tower (or any of the three Crystal Tower raids) is quick and easy and rather fun when I'm not dying because I moved but the game apparently still thinks my healer is in the line of fire.

I really want to get my SMN/SCH to level 70 now so I can concentrate on the other jobs I have going. Because after doing a few groups with a MCH, I want to level mine up more just because it seems fun. Don't care if it's a gimp class or whatever, just setting up a turret and having auto-fire blasting away...

I'll admit some of that is based off watching this fight with Sophia which was recorded by a MCH. I also rather like the HUD layout, too. Song is excellent as well!

I was tempted to pick up the latest expansion through the Steam sale just to mess around with the game again for a month or two (haven't played since before the first expansion). Apparently though there's no way to get an expansion bought on Steam to work with a non-Steam account and base game and Stormblood is still $40 most places so I guess I'll hold off on that for a bit.

Ending up picking up the expansion and resubbing. Hadn't played since whenever the patch was for the Golden Saucer (sometime in 2015 I think). Had a lv. 50 Dragoon but hadn't actually finished the last few story quests let alone any of the stuff they added in prior to the first expansion. After doing a few random things just to get my bearings, I finished off the last couple quests of the original story, and slowly started working on the quests to unlock the Heavensward stuff. I then made the mistake of looking up how many quests there are and saw that I was on #9 out of literally 100, so I took a break from that and started leveling up some other jobs. Currently have;

What server are you on? A lot of the quests go by quickly though, or are simply ferry quests ("gohere, ask this, get that, return") types, which can get annoying but eh, it moves the MSQ along. I'm 69 on my SMN/SCH and no where near the end of the SB MSQ yet.

I got the random FC invites constantly before I joined my current one. like.. total drive-by invites out of nowhere. It really weirded me out at first.

What server are you on? A lot of the quests go by quickly though, or are simply ferry quests ("gohere, ask this, get that, return") types, which can get annoying but eh, it moves the MSQ along. I'm 69 on my SMN/SCH and no where near the end of the SB MSQ yet.

I got the random FC invites constantly before I joined my current one. like.. total drive-by invites out of nowhere. It really weirded me out at first.

I'm on Lamia (and server transfers are $18 so I'm stuck there for the time being). I started focusing on leveling up Conjurer with the intent of going WHM because the duty finder wait times can take a while for DPS.

Most of the group stuff I've done so far hasn't been too bad but then the MSQ sends you to a lv. 35 dungeon I think where the first boss has instant kill mechanics and while every group I had been in for a lower level or lv. 50 dungeon steamrolled through the content, the group I was in for this thing just couldn't get past the first boss. I'd been playing for a several hours by that point so I took a break in went through the first 15 levels of fishing.

Edit: Also I don't know if it's because I'm playing a female character but more than one FC invite involved getting a tell from people calling me Sweetie.

I've been in roulette dungeons where the other players just assume everyone knows what's going on, even though the game tells you when the duty commences that there is one (or more) players who haven't completed this dungeon yet. Had someone bitch me out because I didn't have the limit break button on my hotbar because I'd never used it, even though I was over level 50. I'd leveled with a summoner and literally had never been told to use it in the past, so who cares. The leader actually booted me from the group, freaking dick. Which ended up not mattering, because I had some FC mates who came and ran the dungeon synced with me so I could progress.

If you ever do decide to transfer, I'm on Faerie, you're welcome to come over.

Similar thoughts crossed my mind later but I don't think that would even be worth it.

Anyway, I think I'm roughly halfway through the MSQ stuff leading up to Heavensward. For a team that had to remake almost the whole game at one point, these guys seem really reluctant to cut out content now. Having to go through hours of FedEx quests broken up by the very occasional group content just to get to the expansion content can be pretty tedious at times. I did stumble across the Samurai and Red Mage quests so I got those classes unlocked. I also broke things up a bit by getting the rest of my crafting classes leveled up to 16 or so. Also unlocked WHM and got that up to 31. I'm tempted to get the rest of my jobs up to 15-20 just so I can get rid of all my low level gear and never have it taking up space again.

Inventory management is something this game seriously needs to improve on. Keeping gear is good because you can always use it for another class/job, but trying to hold on to everything is a bitch. I've decided that if it's not green/blue/pink I'm selling it, and I've started just passing on items in dungeons if I don't actively have that class/job (mostly the tank ones atm, since I doubt I want to do that anytime soon).

Really makes me miss being able to carry a gazillion things when I played EQ2.

Plus, I'm a bit leery of using the armoire in the inn rooms (why can't I have one for my room in the FC house?) to keep anything in them. Just seems like it would be risky to me.

I also hate the fact that you can't target through your tank and instead have to target independently. It would be a lot easier to just target the tank and any attacks go through to whatever they are targeting. If the DPS needs to split off to pick up adds, they can, then just target the tank again to pick up the main mob.

You know, if someone wants to eRP, fine, whatever. I'm not entirely opposed to the idea.

But dude, put some freaking effort into it. There's more to it than tickling the tummy of your partner, grinding your bulge into their butt, and pulling on their nipples.

Brought to you by some guy who wanted to eRP with me last night in game, on a character I pretty much never play on, and that was how bad he was at it. OTOH, he's been outed before as a major pervert and now I just feel like mocking him for being so bad at it.

I also hate the fact that you can't target through your tank and instead have to target independently. It would be a lot easier to just target the tank and any attacks go through to whatever they are targeting. If the DPS needs to split off to pick up adds, they can, then just target the tank again to pick up the main mob.

That "functionality" isn't great a lot of the time though. Most often, DPS should be burning down one target at a time. Tanks sometimes need to tab around to build threat or go chasing off to pick up new adds or run down something that got loose. Having your target switch to those is not great.

Besides, it's not difficult to set up an assist macro, and just change the assist to the tank at the beginning of every run, and even if you don't want to do that, it's only a matter of hitting the Fn key associated with the tank and then hitting T to get their target (assuming you're playing on PC)

Though really, your tanks should be marking, and you should just have a macro to target the thing they mark. It's been a while since I played, but I think you can just do a "/ta attack1"

As a long time Tank, I hate DPS targeting through me. I tab around a lot to keep aggro and occasionally land on an out of combat target; bad dps hunters targeting through me often pulled adds this way and it never failed to infuriate me.

Huh, I never actually thought about it like that. I wonder if all tanks feel the same way or not.

I use the cycle through targets function all the time and when on my SMN, I usually work my way through all the mobs and drop my dots on them before going back to whichever main target is being beaten down and start blasting. The dots are never enough to pull aggro to me, but it starts to pick away at them in the meantime.

Huh, I never actually thought about it like that. I wonder if all tanks feel the same way or not.

I can pretty much guarantee that any good tank feels that way, unless they outgear the content so much that proper play just doesn't matter. Any good tank would be marking on meaningful content though, so it's kind of on them if they aren't, and DPS are just doing their own thing.

And yeah, multi-DoTing is only ever an issue if there's some sort of threat drop, or there's such a gear disparity that the tank can't keep up. What with FFXIV scaling equipment though, the latter basically never happens.

Got all the classes leveled up to 30 minimum so I have all of the jobs unlocked now. The tank classes and pugilist were the last ones I had to level and the biggest slogs, but POTD and Squadron missions made it fairly quick. Also leveled all the crafting classes up to 30 minimum mostly though buying stuff for leves, Grand Company provisions, and the Beast Tribe daily quest stuff so that was relatively painless.

I was pushing my way through the HW MSQ stuff as a Dragoon which had been my main job. I've really gotten to like Bard though so I've been leveling that the last couple days and am up to lv. 41. Leveling White Mage more was tempting as the roulette queues were pretty much instantaneous but Bard is just more fun even though there's a lot to keep track of.

Still having fun and haven't burned out on it yet, but a lot of the MSQ is still a slog.

I should do something like that. Right now I'm kind of all over the place with the classes that I do have because I hit level 70 on my SMN/SCH and just went.. meh. I still have MSQ to do and I can't get past the feelign that I'm wasting the XP if I do it on my main class, so SAM it is for now. Not that I'm eager to redo quests but leveling up a new class/job is a slog when the only real way to do things is class specific quests or the roulette, which doesn't open up until 15. Got the DRG to 40 last night and if I never see the inside of Toto-Rak again, it'll be too soon (the RNG seems to like giving me that place). Discovered at the end that our tank was severely under geared, which explained why we were doing better with the Summoner pet Titan and me than with the tank. A level 25-26 shouldn't be wearing level 15 gear, not unless it's really good and at that level, it's not.

Sometimes, I think it's kind of overwhelming just how much you can do in game and I get stuck with "what do I feel like doing now?" when I just want to poke around a bit. I do want to pick up archer for bard and maybe I'll finish out the healer grouping by getting conjurer started.

Also, I haven't spent a lot of time on the Lodestone site, so I didn't know just how much information that had. I can look at the inventory of my retainers to see what each has on them, along with the sales history. That's some crazy data gathering.

What does the squadron stuff get you and how does it help with leveling? I've got my squad up to level 2 and the recruits are all level 20, but I also have no idea what I'm doing really.

Since your squad is rank 2 and lv. 20, there should be an option now for Command Missions (should be the first option on the list now when you talk to your Personnel Officer). Command Missions are basically solo Dungeon runs where you can use your squadron as NPC party members. You can't really do much to control them aside from a button to engage and one to disengage, and their AI is fairly basic, which is probably why there's only a handful of Dungeons available (they can't really do anything with complex mechanics). There's only about a dozen dungeons available I think and they still have their level requirements so at 20 you can only do Halatali, at 24 you can start doing Toto-Rak, etc..., so it gets a bit tedious if that's the only way you're leveling. If you switch back and forth between that, POTD, and leveling roulettes it breaks up the monotony a bit. The main selling point for Command Missions is that you don't have to wait in a queue for it.

There is a lot to do in this game and it doesn't always explain it well. It took me a long time for instance to figure out that when you're putting stuff for sale on the market with your retainers that there's a button you can press to see the current prices for that item, or that if you right click on an item (in your inventory, on the market, or most importantly on crafting ingredients) you can search your inventory and see if you have it in any of your or your retainers inventory slots, and where. POTD seems to be the most common way of leveling alt jobs and I don't know if there's really any explanation in game or any note for returning players that says "hey you should try this and here's how you unlock it). I had to read message boards to find out about POTD, Squadron Missions, and Beast Tribe daily quests. They have that tab that pops up when you log in that has recommended activities, but that just seems to point out whatever quests happen to be in the area, level appropriate or not.

On the plus side, have a bunch of stuff available to do has kept me from burning out since I'm really not an endgame raiding kind of person. I'd post up my class levels also, but Lodestone apparently has some server issues right now.

I just hit squad rank 2 yesterday, so I'll have to try out the command missions next. That might be a good way for me to work with my DRK a bit, since I'm leery of tanking with actual groups. I have no idea what I'm doing as a tank, although the game doesn't seem to require strategies as much as WoW did. Or maybe it does and I don't know about those strats yet.

I knew about the check prices button when putting stuff on the market, but the first time I was listing items I did it the hard manual way and it was annoying. The button is much nicer. Still, it reminds me that so many people have no clue how to work the markets and they just put stuff up for the sell rate and totally screw everything up.

I didn't know that you could search all inventories though. That would be handy since between my two retainers, my inventory, and my saddlebags, I can't keep track of what I have where.

I didn't know about the Beast Tribe daily crafter quests for the longest time and it was frustrating to me to level, which is why I only have weaver started. Now that I know about these though, I definitely want to get carpenter going, if only so I can make more stuff to decorate my FC room.

I just hit squad rank 2 yesterday, so I'll have to try out the command missions next. That might be a good way for me to work with my DRK a bit, since I'm leery of tanking with actual groups. I have no idea what I'm doing as a tank, although the game doesn't seem to require strategies as much as WoW did. Or maybe it does and I don't know about those strats yet.

Tanking doesn't seem too complicated most of the time and seems to mostly just be "keep the enemy facing away from the rest of the group", at least that's the impression I get anytime a watch a video on a dungeon. It is a bit intimidating doing roulettes though (as a tank or healer) because you're getting something at random which doesn't give you a chance to watch a video on and brush up on the mechanics. I guess the alternative there is to just manually select dungeons that you're comfortable with or have researched beforehand.

In the command missions, the healer does sometimes seem to have trouble keeping up with the healing sometimes when you're playing the tank so when you're doing those you may not want to actually hold agro all the time or for all the mobs, but you should be able to get at least some practice in and get an idea of what you're doing.

One of the main downsides of POTD, especially since people doing random groups mostly just do 1-10, and 11-20, and you don't actually have to have a balanced party, is that you can level up fairly quickly but not really get any experience with playing your role in a group.

Tried out a squad command mission last night on my DRK and it went well. It's been a long time since I've done Hatali or whatever it's called, but it was smooth for the most part. Obviously the squad members don't attack until I do, which makes me wonder how it will work if I'm the healer. But for the most part, I just whacked at things, my healer kept me alive and the archer and lancer out damaged me pretty well. Lancer died on the last boss mob but that didn't matter too much, got it done and leveled the DRK, so it was a success. If nothing else, doing these by myself will force me to learn the dungeons and what needs to be done to complete them. Since I'm usually DPS, it's far too easy to just follow along and hit things without thinking too hard.

Almost got the SAM to 68 last night, too. Did an alliance raid which was a bit of a cluster. No one talking to each other, the healers didn't res (I expect to die at least once per raid as a SAM), and no one was making sure that the alliance was ready before engaging bosses. Plus it was World of Darkness and I loathe that second boss fight. Doesn't matter what I play, I die at least once each fight there. I think I'm going to get the SAM to 70 (so I'll have 3 chars maxed out) and then poke around on other classes/jobs while picking away at the MSQ.